Making Money? Off of blogs?

One of the great things about having your email associated to your blog is that people you have never heard from send you emails.



Here is one I received recently:

I'm the webmaster of [website removed]
I wanted to know if by any chance you would be interested in doing an unbiased review of our site [website removed] on your blog http://tmtomh.blogspot.com/

If you agree you can choose between receiving a product sample or receiving a payment.

If you choose the product sample instead of the payment the sample is yours to keep and you don’t need to send it back.

The product sample that you can get is %product and you can see it there: %product_url

Please let me know if you are interested.

Thank you
Z. R

If you want to receive more paid review proposals, just click the following link:

[link removed]

***

Ok, seriously, have you read my blog? My last two posts were about commercializing suicidal tendencies and doing everything I can to make dogs misbehave. And the one before that featured a drunk, pill-popping baby.

Do you think the intelligent, wealthy, and smokin' hott (with no 'g' and two 't's) people who read such high-brow material are just clamoring on my unbiased thoughts and feelings about your website? Probably not.

And while I'm at it, after reviewing my blog, what made you think I use it to do reviews of other websites? And how exactly does one review a website, let alone do an unbiased review? (I found it very clickable, so I give it four stars.)

And what the heck is a %product?

Another Customer Complaint

I recently bought a Dell laptop.

I recently got an email, apparently from Dell, saying that if I take this survey about my laptop, I might win another laptop.

This sounded fishy to me, or, more specifically, phishy.

So I filled out a customer form to Dell, copying and pasting the email into their form with a quick note, "Is this spam? Is this a phishing scam?"

And this was the response:

I would have been glad to assist you in this query, however, let me please inform you that we , at Customer Care only deals with post-sales and logistics issues.

Therefore, I would request you to please contact our Customer care department at
the toll free number 1-800-624-9897 between 7AM to 11 PM CST Monday through
Saturday for this particular issue as they would only be able to verify the
requested information.

***

I would think that, on a corporate level, that any company would love to have internet con artists not sullying their good corporate names and logos. Paypal, eBay, and Cingular all have email addresses for you to FWD emails to if you think they're suspect. Why isn't this an industry standard? And why can't the Dell support guy simply click the hyperlink in the email to see what happens? I'm totally afraid to, but why can't someone behind a Dell corporate firewall do so? And why can't someone in customer support just look at current marketing promotions and see if this is a legitimate one or not?

These are some of the problems with being a large corporation with a strong brand presence. I just don't understand why Dell isn't prepared for this.